Contributions of infant learning to language acquisition

婴儿学习对语言习得的贡献

• 批准号: 8467333
• 负责人: DANIEL SWINGLEY
• 金额: $ 35.73万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-08-21 至 2017-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8467333
• 关键词: 2 year old; Accounting; Acoustics; Address; Adult; Awareness; Categories; Child; Complement; Computer Simulation; Detection; Development; Disease; Educational process of instructing; Environment; Event; Goals; Grant; Hearing; Individual Differences; Infant; Intuition; Knowledge; Label; Language; Language Delays; Language Development; Learning; Light; Linguistics; Link; Mental Processes; Methods; Modeling; Mothers; Outcome; Participant; Perception; Philadelphia; Phonetics; Population; Reading; Research; Research Personnel; Signal Transduction; Socioeconomic Status; Sorting - Cell Movement; Source; Speech; Speech Perception; Speech Sound; Structure; Sum; System; Techniques; Testing; Time; Tin; Toddler; Training; Variant; Work; abstracting; base; hearing impairment; heuristics; infancy; interest; language perception; lexical; novel; phonology; public health relevance; research study; skills; sound; theories; visual stimulus

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children don't say their first words until around the time of their first birthday, but research using experimental methods has shown that infants learn a great deal about their language before they start saying words. Researchers now believe that infants learn to perceive their language's speech sound categories (consonants and vowels) in the first year, and they learn to recognize dozens of words (even if they don't know what they mean). This project will help us determine how this learning happens, and how it helps children make further progress in language learning over the second year. The project begins by following up on the investigator's discovery that even infants as young as 6 months already know what some words mean; using recently developed techniques, it will be possible to tell whether infants learn abstract words as well as more concrete ones, and what kinds of learning mechanisms may be responsible. The project will also support study of the acoustics of infant-directed speech and testing of computational models of how infants might learn vowels, starting from a theory stating that knowing words helps infants learn speech sound categories. A second set of experiments will test how infants and toddlers learn to tell when two different-sounding words really are different words (like "ten" and "tin") and when they are the same (like "ten" spoken in different linguistic environments). Thus, the project will trace the development of speech sound perception and interpretation from early infancy into the second year, aiming for mechanistic explanations of the child's first steps in language acquisition.

描述（由申请人提供）：孩子们直到一岁生日左右才会说出他们的第一句话，但使用实验方法的研究表明，婴儿在开始说话之前就已经了解了很多关于他们的语言的知识。研究人员现在认为，婴儿在第一年就学会了感知语言的语音类别（辅音和元音），并且学会识别数十个单词（即使他们不知道它们的意思）。这个项目将帮助我们确定这种学习是如何发生的，以及它如何帮助孩子们在第二年的语言学习中取得进一步的进步。该项目首先跟进研究人员的发现，即即使是 6 个月大的婴儿也已经知道某些单词的含义；使用最近开发的技术，将有可能判断婴儿是否学习抽象单词以及更具体的单词，以及哪种学习机制可能负责。该项目还将支持对婴儿定向语音的声学研究，并测试婴儿如何学习元音的计算模型，从认识单词有助于婴儿学习语音类别的理论出发。第二组实验将测试婴儿和幼儿如何学习辨别两个发音不同的单词何时确实是不同的单词（例如“ten”和“tin”）以及何时它们是相同的单词（例如在不同语言环境中所说的“ten”） ）。因此，该项目将追踪 从婴儿早期到二年级的语音感知和解释，旨在机械地解释孩子语言习得的第一步。